Far from the undisciplined, semi-delusional dropout described by friends, Jared Loughner appeared to be a young man with laser focus when it came to planning and carrying out a shooting spree outside a strip-mall Safeway last week, local law enforcement authorities alleged Friday....

Back to the topic, crazy people can be quite rational, if what you really mean is LOGICAL. Perfect logic with nonsensical premises yields craziness--this is what Lewis Carroll's books were about.

He planned logically to do something evil for purposes that make no sense.

Did we forget his syllogisms on YouTube? I didn't check them all but they seemed to be valid. The reason they sound crazy is because he clearly thought they meant something profound, when they are trivial.

Far from the undisciplined, semi-delusional dropout described by friends, Jared Loughner appeared to be a young man with laser focus when it came to planning and carrying out a shooting spree outside a strip-mall ....

The writers assume that a crazy person isn't capable of forming a coherent plan and carrying it out. They're mistaken.

For nearly two years (while in grad school) I was on the clinical staff in the intensive treatment unit of a psychiatric hospital (the hub of the psychiatry program at an Ivy League medical school).

I recall one patient who escaped by diverting staff attention and climbing into the small dumbwaiter that hoisted meals from the kitchen to the unit. He rode the dumbwaiter to the basement, got out, triggered a fire alarm to further divert attention, then calmly walked out of the hospital and into the woods.

Judging by his ability to devise and carry out such a plan, one might suppose he was sane. But he did it because "the voices" told him to. Therein lay his craziness.

I saw other patients carry out similarly rational plans -- because they were under orders as secret agents of the CIA (a favorite among schizophrenics), or because the people on television were watching them and planning to kill them, so they had to escape, etc., etc.

Was Loughner crazy? I don't know. But I do know that you can't answer that question by his ability to carry out an intricate plan to kill people.

Delusions don't prevent rational thought. They just cause rational thought to yield bizarre results, because the person involved is reasoning based on what amounts to faulty data.

Which NewAge is. And this:

If the student is unable to locate the external universe, the student is unable to locate the internal universe....

...is definitely NewAge. It's not "crazy" in the sense everyone's describing it (skitzo) but as Revenant, his girlfriend, and I am. The man's acting from faulty information.

The tragedy, to me, is the almost willful desire to ignore the truth of this, in favor of political or therapeutic talk. Like Oprah talking to Rielle Hunter, and few acknowledging it was the pot calling the kettle black (since it was Oprah's philosophy of "make your own truth" that Rielle was using) the same mental slight of hand is being worked here, making almost everyone discussing this look crazy in the same manner as the shooter:

Gravedance? You mean like using a dead man's image as your avatar, while ridiculing the appearance of his teeth with your shitty snark screen name? (Which, by the way, on my display, runs into the avatar, rendering it only semi-legible...)

Dadvocate -- yeah, he's a criminal mastermind. A regular Professor Moriarty. You left out the rest -- wound primary target, kill non-targets indiscriminately, get captured, pose for perhaps the most embarrassing mug shot of all time.

Gravedance? You mean like using a dead man's image as your avatar, while ridiculing the appearance of his teeth with your shitty snark screen name? (Which, by the way, on my display, runs into the avatar, rendering it only semi-legible...)

That's how it looks on mine, too - the name running into the avatar, I mean. he can ridicule Buckley all he wants:

Loughner was/is quite delusional. The WaPo seems to think if your delusional, you can't function. They're wrong. He was laser focused, obsessed even, on acting on his delusions. The "plan" was about as simple as a plan gets.